He closed his eyes and appeared to drift for a little while, and I thought the afternoon’s conversation might have come to an end. It was nearing four. The palliative care nurse was due at four-thirty. But then his color deepened and he opened his eyes. They had the clarity of pain. The meds were wearing off.
“Every infraction at Wallkill, you got time added to your sentence. Fighting, getting into a dustup with another inmate, they would add a lot of time. Months. Months for one fight. The only thing worse was if you tried to escape, ‘going over the hill,’ they called it. And then? If you got into another fight after that? The way you probably would, if you started something serious with a hard-on like Hub Gorman? They shipped you off to Green Haven. Or Auburn. Maximum security. Where they put the bad guys, prison prison. Your mother was fourteen when I went in, Mike. Stuck in Baltimore, where she didn’t know a soul. Living with a pool hustler and a grumpy old lady. Stuck there till the day I come get her. And your grandmother . . .”
“I know,” I said. “I’m sorry. I’m not reproaching you. Hey, I’m sorry, Grandpa.” He was looking out the window. The momzer sat on the top of the fence, facing the ivy-tangled slope, its back to the birdfeeder. Making a show of indifference or surrender. “It’s time for your pill.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Come on. I’m really sorry, okay? Come on, you need it. Grandpa.” I said Grandpa again, but in an Eeyore voice. Then I said it in the voice of Darth Vader. He kept looking out the window at the squirrel, who was so much less trying company than his grandson. “What do you want to take it with?” I said.
He rolled his head in my direction. “Cold beer.”
“Seriously? Is that okay?”
He lifted an eyebrow no more than a quarter of an inch. Just high enough to say, What the fuck difference could it possibly make?
I went to the kitchen, opened a bottle of Dos Equis, and poured some into a plastic cup. I was fairly new to California at the time, and Mexican beer still held considerable allure. On further reflection, I transferred the beer from the plastic cup into a tall glass and topped it off from the bottle, tilting it so he could swallow his pill without getting a mouthful of foam. I carried the glass of beer into the guest bedroom with a certain ceremoniousness. For some reason I was really looking forward to seeing him drink a little beer.
He put the Dilaudid onto his sueded tongue and washed it down with a healthy swallow of Dos Equis.
“Rock and roll,” I said.
He closed his eyes. In his contentment he looked handsome and severe. “Mmm,” he said.
“Good, right?”
“Good.”
“Have a little more.”
I passed the glass to him again and he took another long pull. He handed me back the glass. “Enough,” he said. “Thank you. Go ahead, honey, you finish it.”
I sat down in the chair and had a sip of beer and watched him smack his lips. The complicated bitterness seemed to linger and resonate on his tongue.
“Storch, what a nudnik,” he said. “I must have been nuts.”
26
At Wallkill in the evenings your time, for the most part, was your own. The recreation room had table tennis, board games, and a monstrous console with a record player and a radio. Partway through my grandfather’s stretch, Dr. Wallack, the warden, had a new Philco television brought in at his own expense and installed beside the radio, so the men could watch the fights on Friday night. The casualty rate for Ping-Pong balls exceeded the rate of resupply, and the records for some reason were devoted primarily to polka music or instruction in Portuguese. Many of the board games were on their fourth or fifth set of tokens, counters, and dice, improvised or crafted by inmates from spools, bottle caps, corks, modeling clay. In the case of Monopoly, the entire board had been redrafted onto a sheet of pine by some wistful or ironic cartographer who substituted the streets of Albany, New York, for those of Atlantic City, discounting all the properties by fifty percent. Reception on the television was dreadful, but many of the men would watch anything that passed across the screen of the Philco, furious blizzards of static, prizefighting ghosts.
Some of the prisoners, having exhausted the recreation room’s store of wonders, simply retired to their cells every night. Many joined a prayer circle or weekly Bible study. Most of them took up a hobby sooner or later. They painted in watercolors and oils. They carved duck decoys, built birdhouses, bent sheets of metal into napkin holders. They turned table legs on lathes and then affixed them to tabletops they had coped and mortised. They put in extra time caring for the livestock, in particular the horses. My grandfather naturally found his way to the so-called Hut, where in addition to a Hallicrafters shortwave radio and a darkroom there was a radio repair workbench.
People from the towns and villages around Wallkill would bring their radios to the prison to be repaired for the price of parts. Radios went on the fritz in interesting ways and could be repaired in ways that were satisfying. It was a matter of having the right parts and the proper tools and then ruling out the possibilities one by one. To my grandfather that was more or less a recipe for solace. When he lay awake in his bunk at night, his own problems felt so amorphous; in his dreams they were as infinite as mirrors reflecting one another. But in the radio repair shop, in the innards of a Magnavox, problems could be picked off, hunted down, cornered. They could be eliminated with a cotton swab, a piece of copper braid, or a drop of solder. And he had always loved the sugary tang of solder smoke, hot off the tip of the iron.
Even on those nights when Dr. Storch showed up in the Hut, he was easier for my grandfather to handle or to ignore. Storch would put on a headset and sit for hours in front of the Hallicrafters in the corner. He took in the news from Rádio Nacional in Brazil, from Radio Moscow, from Deutsche Welle. He monitored the chatter and technical rundowns broadcast by stargazers and weather watchers around the world who had been recruited to record and transmit their observations during this International Geophysical Year. He lost himself amid the interlacing transmissions of a million solitary amateurs reaching out to one another in the night.
On the first Friday evening of my grandfather’s first October at Wallkill, Hub Gorman wandered into the Hut. It was not a customary haunt of Gorman’s, and my grandfather saw at once that he was looking to make trouble. Gorman stood for a moment just inside the doorway. He nodded to my grandfather. His close-cropped skull was indented on one side as by the corner of a two-by-four. In the crevice formed by his brow and cheekbones, his eyes glinted like dimes lost between sofa cushions. He had spotted Dr. Storch in the corner, his back to the door and the trouble that had just shambled through it.
Gorman started across the lab with practiced slowness. The man took his time to do almost anything: roll a cigarette, get out of a chair, finish a bowl of chile con carne, lick the spoon. When a guard gave him an order, he pondered it. His languor was partly a kind of insubordination through indifference. It was also a manner of predation. He was an alligator sunning himself on a rock.
“Gorman,” my grandfather said. “C’mere, look at this.”
Gorman stopped. He was only two or three feet from Dr. Storch. He cracked his knuckles. It sounded like a string of squibs going off. He turned with the usual show of hastelessness.
My grandfather held up a gaudy gold and red box that once held two dozen Romeo y Julietas.
“Don’t smoke,” Gorman said. He pointed at his mouth with a knobby finger. “Chew gum.”
“Not cigars.”
The cleft between Gorman’s cheeks and brows diminished. He made his way over to the electronics workbench.